Editorial: Time for Trump to turn book tour into presidential campaign

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Donald Trump appears on his way to losing the presidential election by the largest margin since Ronald Reagan blitzed Walter Mondale, and he will have only himself to blame.

We write this -- not hopeful but disappointed -- that the presumptive GOP nominee appears to be flaming out. He appears disinterested in continuing the grind that is running for president. He looks like a candidate who has nothing else to say and has grown tired of hearing himself rattle off the same, lame attack lines.

America needs a constructive discussion about who will be the next president of the United States. But Trump seems as if he is ready to take his participant trophy, write his next book about how he duped a party and a nation, make his next fortune off of running for president and start his next reality show.

Maybe we are wrong. Maybe he is resetting his campaign, as his talking-head disciples -- who worship at the altar of Trump -- want us to believe. They say he is ready to take the fight to Hillary, preach from his own conservative gospel and make believers of the general electorate.

It beats reality.

While elections can’t be won during the dog days of June, they can be lost and Trump appears to be losing and losing badly. By basically all accounts, he has no money, no campaign network, high negatives, a low ceiling of people he can convince to vote for him and a general election map that decidedly favors Democrats over Republicans before the first vote is cast.

The good news for America is that it’s June and not October. The good news for Republicans is there is time for Trump to engage -- not the record primary voters who will show up for him no matter the circumstances, but the conservatives he has turned off, the Republicans he turned his back on during the primary and the independents who can’t stand the idea of Hillary Clinton backing her way into the presidency. The decision will be up to Trump. Does he want to run a winning campaign or is he -- as liberal commentator Rachel Maddow theorized this week -- running a glorified book tour.

Sound far-fetched? Trump’s record number of Republican primary votes totaled 13.3 million. Barack Obama had a total of 69.5 million when he won the presidency in 2008. Any one really believe the Trump we have seen lately has another 50 million votes in his pocket? At this point, Mondale’s 37.5 million seems more likely. Maybe our prospects for Trump will change. Maybe Trump will surprise us and demonstrate to tens of millions of more voters that he is worthy. Or maybe he’s writing the final chapter about how he fooled millions of voters and ruined a political party.